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Andy Fox's legacy: How Grand Haven teen's death in rip current has sparked life-saving changes

The family of Andy Fox helped place this call box on the beach of Grand Haven State Park. Fox, 17, died after being caught in a Lake Michigan rip current at Grand Haven State Park Sept. 3, 2003. This picture was taken Aug. 28, 2013. (Cory Morse | MLive.com)

"I remember telling my family that the lake doesn't give anybody back very easily," Vicki Cech said of her son.

GRAND HAVEN, MI - For years, Vicki Cech and her family would indulge in a favorite Lake Michigan ritual: spreading a blanket on the beach at Grand Haven State Park and watching the setting sun sink into the horizon.

But her desire to stretch out on the sand and ponder the waves died 10 years ago when her son, Andy Fox, went for an after-school swim and never returned. A teen swimming with him said they’d been caught in a rip current and exhausted themselves struggling to break free from its body-sucking grip.

The friend managed to reach the beach, but Fox disappeared beneath the waves. His family and friends stood vigil along the shore for two days until rescuers found the body of the brown-haired boy. He was just 17.

“I remember just looking in that water and wondering ‘Where the heck is he?’ I truly just kept hoping and praying that they were going to find him washed up somewhere unconscious and that’s why we haven’t heard from him yet. But unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen,” Cech said.

“I remember telling my family … that the lake doesn’t give anybody back very easily.”

While Lake Michigan has claimed countless victims, Fox’s death was among a cluster of three drownings at Grand Haven in 2003 that served as a catalyst for change along West Michigan’s lakeshore.

Other changes are more tangible. The day Fox drowned, there was a life ring at the beach, but it was too far away to be of help. Today, 15 life rings line Grand Haven’s south pier. They are connected to an alarm system allowing 911 dispatchers to immediately send water rescue units to the beach.

But the tragedies it took to get to this point can’t be forgotten.

Playing in the Big Waves

It was Sept. 3, 2003, and kids at Grand Haven High School were buzzing about the big waves building on Lake Michigan. After classes ended, Beau Rycenga drove his Jeep to Fox’s house and the two seniors headed for the state park beach, jamming to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” with the top down.

“We were having a good time,” Rycenga recalled. “I remember that drive. … I was having a good time with my buddy.”

At the beach, the teens stood in awe of the 5-foot waves churning toward shore. Unbeknownst to them, high winds and waves meant the National Weather Service had issued a small craft advisory for the big lake.

The teens stripped down to their boxer shorts and headed into the waves to body surf, planning to let the big lake’s power carry them to shore.

“We were both excited,” Rycenga said. “We grew up there and when we saw the waves, it looked like fun.”

Fifteen minutes later, they were about 300 feet from shore when they decided to head back to the beach. Rycenga, then 18, remembers struggling a bit as he started swimming in the chest-high water. He was half-swimming, not able to get a good foothold on the lake’s sandy bottom.

“At that point, Andy was really struggling and he started grabbing onto me,” Rycenga said. “I was struggling … I was pulling him and trying to do whatever we could to get in.

“I kept telling him, ‘You gotta swim. We gotta get in.’ ”

The pair had no idea they were caught in a deadly rip current, and they didn’t know how to swim out of it. Physically exhausted and sick to his stomach, Rycenga was able to fight through the current and reach the shore.

“I could barely stand,” he remembered. “Every part of my body was completely exhausted. It took all the energy I had to get back in.”

When Rycenga looked back, he said he could see Fox’s head bobbing in the water, and hear him calling for help.

Rycenga told people on the beach that his friend needed help. That distress call was passed to campers at the nearby state park campground, who alerted park rangers while Rycenga waited at the water’s edge.

“It was hard to just sit on the beach and see the shadow of my friend in the water and hear his voice screaming for help,” he said. “I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what.”

A Lengthy Search

At 5:12 p.m. that day, rescue units got the call that sent them streaming onto the beach. The state park’s rangers were the first in the water. Grand Haven Public Safety Department responded, along with the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department and the local Coast Guard station.

Rescuers formed human chains, combing the lake south of the south pierhead for any sign of Fox. Rescue boats rocked in the rough waves as they motored through search grids, and a Coast Guard helicopter from Air Station Traverse City circled overhead.

“I wanted to get in the chain to help, but they wouldn’t let me,” Rycenga said. “It was unbelievable. I never heard of something like this happening so I thought it can’t be happening. I was just waiting for them to pull him out and would know that it was going to be OK.”

Becky Rycenga was unloading groceries when she got the call alerting her to what had happened to her son and Fox.

“I just remember feeling so scared about what was happening to Andy,” Becky Rycenga said.

She raced to the beach. She remembers seeing her son sitting on a blanket, crying, with officers nearby.

“I almost didn’t make it, Mom,” she remembers him saying to her. “I just hugged him.”

Becky Rycenga saw Fox’s watch on the blanket and put it on for safekeeping. It stayed on her arm until Fox’s mom, Vicki Cech, rush down to the shoreline. The two mothers hugged tightly through their tears, and Fox’s watch was strapped onto Cech’s wrist, where it would stay for nearly two years.

“I was hoping we’d wake up from a bad dream – I just couldn’t believe it,” said Joe Cech, Vicki’s husband and Fox’s stepfather, of the search for the missing teen.

Fox’s father, Dan Fox, was at work in Hastings when he received the phone call from his older son, Ryan Fox.

“I’ll never forget that time and that moment,” Dan Fox said. “That was the longest 75 miles I’ve ever driven.”

All that night – and the next day and night – Fox’s family and friends kept vigil at the beach.

“I wasn’t going to leave Andy down there by himself,” Cech said. “I don’t remember a lot about those days. … We stayed there overnight and I remember the boats going back and forth. I remember the big waves and just kept thinking, ‘I can’t believe my son’s in there.’”

On the morning of Sept. 5, the waves subsided. The water smoothed to glass and a rainbow appeared. Rescue units using side-scan sonar found Fox’s body 200 yards from shore.

The Boy Who Said “I Love You.”

“I think it’s every parent’s worst nightmare to lose a child,” Becky Rycenga said. “It’s beyond comprehension what Vicki went through in losing Andy. My heart constantly goes out to her and always will.”

Beau Rycenga, now 28 and living in Montana, remembers how easy it was to be friends with Fox. His childhood pal had grown into a kind-hearted teen who was comfortable enough in his own skin to get along with everyone.

Fox was just a week into his senior year when he died. He worked part-time at a local grocery store and for his stepfather’s excavating company. The youngest of three siblings, he’d recently been fitted for a tuxedo, which he would have worn for his high school chamber choir’s performance at Carnegie Hall in New York City later that fall.

“Andy wasn’t afraid to tell his mom in front of his friends that he loved her,” Cech said of her son. “When we were on the phone, he always told me that he loved me before he hung up.”

“It was too painful and brought back too many memories of the days and nights waiting for him to be found,” she said. “There came a point, though, when I knew I had to make an effort to change how I felt about the water. … Slowly I was able to start getting in the water again, but it has never felt the same.”

“ … I know Andy would never want me - or any of the rest if his family or friends - to spend our lives afraid of the water. He'd want us to enjoy beach days the way he did,” she said. “We just need to use a little extra caution, now that we have a better understanding of the serious dangers the lake can pose.”

Dan Fox said he drives by Grand Haven’s shoreline and occasionally throws a fishing line off the pier, but it’s not a place he visits often.

And Andy Fox’s mother still shies away from the shoreline.

“It’s amazing after 10 years how much it still hurts,” she said. “But you have to go ahead in life. You don’t have any choice but to move forward.”

Coming Tuesday:See how life-saving tools and water safety education have changed in Grand Haven and in West Michigan in the 10 years since Fox's death.